Rodrigo Zan is a Brazilian filmmaker and photographer whose work returns, again and again, to the same few things: people trying to break free of something that holds them — a father, a place, a grief — and the strange ways the dead keep speaking to the living.

That thread runs from Jimbo (2016), a short about a boy escaping an oppressive father, screened at more than thirty festivals worldwide, to the documentary Up North (2022), about a man who leaves everything behind to start over in the wild, released by Gravitas Ventures. His photography — deserts, coastlines, long road trips across the Americas and Africa — chases the same instinct: distance, silence, freedom.

Rodrigo came to film sideways. He built and sold a digital company in São Paulo, studied filmmaking at the New York Film Academy, and spent years directing branded work for the likes of Airbnb, Lacoste, and Spotify before turning fully to the stories he actually wanted to tell. His most recent feature, Gato Galáctico e o Feitiço do Tempo (2024), reached a wide audience through Disney+.

He is now back to making his own films — horror and magical realism rooted in the same obsessions — where the craft finally serves something personal.